Archivum - ‘Rules’

This 24 page document represents the distilled core rules of Kard és Mágia, my homebrew old school OGL variant. Published in 2008, the game has surprisingly attracted some attention outside Hungary, and some of my friends on international message boards have asked me if I could translate it some day. That was not possible: the original consists of altogether 190 pages of dense 9-point text, a tremendous task to recreate in English. I have also felt some of it would not be interesting for the English-speaking audience, since the game was written not just to present a way of playing games in the classical style while also retaining the elegance of the basic d20 rules framework, but also as an introduction to the concept of old school gaming (a style virtually unknown in Hungary) and, to an extent, a polemic against the state of the Hungarian gaming scene, where imagination, adventure and the primal strangeness of original fantasy have largely been suppressed by an inflexible and dogmatic preference for mundane detail.(tovább…)